TY - JOUR
AU - Hanushek,Eric A.
AU - Kain,John F.
AU - O'Brien,Daniel M.
AU - Rivkin,Steven G.
TI - The Market for Teacher Quality
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 11154
PY - 2005
Y2 - February 2005
DO - 10.3386/w11154
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11154
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11154.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Eric A. Hanushek
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
Tel: 650/736-0942
Fax: 650/723-1687
E-Mail: hanushek@stanford.edu
John Kain
Director
Cecil and Ida Green Center for the Study of Scienc
Mail Station GC21
P.O. Box 830688
Richardson, TX 75083-0688
Tel: 972-883-2555
E-Mail: N/A user is deceased
Daniel O'Brien
University of Texas at Dallas
E-Mail: obri@utdallas.edu
Steven G. Rivkin
Department of Economics
University of Illinois at Chicago
601 South Morgan UH725 M/C144
Chicago, IL 60607
Tel: 312.413.2368
E-Mail: sgrivkin@uic.edu
M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2005-08-01
AB - Much of education policy focuses on improving teacher quality, but most policies lack strong research support. We use student achievement gains to estimate teacher value-added, our measure of teacher quality. The analysis reveals substantial variation in the quality of instruction, most of which occurs within rather than between schools. Although teacher quality appears to be unrelated to advanced degrees or certification, experience does matter -- but only in the first year of teaching. We also find that good teachers tend to be effective with all student ability levels but that there is a positive value of matching students and teachers by race. In the second part of the analysis, we show that teachers staying in our sample of urban schools tend to be as good as or better than those who exit. Thus, the main cost of large turnover is the introduction of more first year teachers. Finally, there is little or no evidence that districts that offer higher salaries and have better working conditions attract the higher quality teachers among those who depart the central city district. The overall results have a variety of direct policy implications for the design of school accountability and the compensation of teachers.
ER -